Research On DTV System Information And Statistical Multiplexing Technology

The DTV technology has developed fast in recent years. With DTV technique, several programs can be transmitted in a single traditional analog channel. Thus, much more programs will be provided by DTV. As requirements of DTV applications, some issues are raised, such as Electronic Program Guide (EPG) and bandwidth usage. This paper mainly focuses on the research of service information multiplexing and statistical multiplexing of multi-programs technology.Electronic Program Guides (EPG) is used in DTV system to provide informations such as program description and playing times. The main works of this paper focus on analysis of MPEG-2 PSI (Program Specific Information), service information insertion and retrieval of DVB and ATSC system. Based on related standards, PSI, DVB SI (Service Information) and ATSC PSIP (Program and System Information Protocol) analyzing software is designed. In addition, a software SI and PSIP service information table generator is also developed to insert service information into DTV Transport Stream (TS). The most difficult problem in the work is adjusting the maximum and minimum time interval according to the standards.The second part of this paper focuses on TS statistical multiplexing technology. Several programs can be transmitted within one DTV channel. Because the video content is different between programs, the bitrate should be adjusted according to the content complexity to achieve an equal video quality. Joint rate control method is used to reallocate the bitrate of every program. The statistical multiplexing scheme proposed by this paper is based on a video transcoding platform. It reuses the some information of input video stream to control the ouput bitrate. The emphasis of this work is joint rate control algorithm: allocating bandwaidth based on the complexity of each pogram. Some rate control algorithm is proposed, and the test results showed that the suggested method can effectively reallocate bitrate between the programs while keeping good video quality.Design of HDTV and SDTV definition test patterns is also addressed in this paper. Some of the patterns have been accepted by Ministry of Information Industry of China, and issued as National DTV Standards.